With the advent of the Internet and other applications, computing system requirements and demands have increased dramatically. Many businesses, for example, have made important investments relating to Internet technology to support growing electronic businesses such as E-Commerce and other Internet related activities. In view of this and other considerations, hardware and software systems generally have become more complex in order to facilitate serving desired computational and/or network load requirements.
Today's web-based applications, for example, consist of many different types of resources providing various aspects of these systems. Managing these applications is a problematic and error prone endeavor, however. Since the resources often are dependent upon each other, it is important for an administrator to maintain the proper versions of the resources relative to each other when interacting with these applications. In addition to “versioning”, there is an affinity and a dependence wherein, one file relies on a completely separate file, for example. Consequently, this is time-consuming and inefficient since clearly defining and maintaining an application generally requires knowledge of all resources associated with the application. Similarly, communications involving the application generally requires communication and knowledge of all components and/or resources of the application (e.g., for each and every person who interacts with the application at an administrative level).
During the development of an application, it is thus difficult to maintain knowledge of the components that make up the application. For example, currently there generally are no efficient tools or technologies for the definition and/or maintenance of the resources that make up an application. In addition, moving and/or copying of the application is problematic and error prone as it requires the administrator to be aware of all the various parts that make up the application. Monitoring an application is also problematic since it generally requires separate monitoring of the various portions of the application. Furthermore, performing various administrative tasks, such as, versioning, deployment, rolling back, and scheduling tasks, for example, along with other issues, is problematic and also error prone since, these tasks generally operate on each resource individually.